Statistics in Media Perception and Ability to Assess Bias in News Content

The major media avenues are television, radio, and emails. The problem statement which lead to the research of the phenomena is to find out whether media is a matter of perception or people usually form perception based on their on their beliefs or the content that is presented in the media. The research questions • How do perceptions of politically biased news influence their ability to process political information? • There any significant variation between the perception of bias and their ability to retain information? • How do perceptions of ideological bias in the news media affect opinions on news stories? The hypotheses 1. If Individuals believe a media outlet is ideologically slanted in a liberal direction, they will also perceive the news content from that outlet to be ideologically slanted in the same direction.

There is no significant difference in the individual’s belief of outlet ideological orientation and their perceptions of bias in the subsequent news content of that outlet. The authors further illustrate that there is a relationship between consumer demand for slant and the newspaper’s response by supplying that slant. It was discovered that if a newspaper circulated in a neighborhood that was predominately Democrat and this area preferred the newspaper to have a certain degree of liberal slant then shifting that slant to the right of the political spectrum would result in a drop of demand from that Democrat audience. Independent and dependent variables Independent Variables of the research are the individual participants who were oriented to news outlets such as the CNN and the FOX News.